Comparing Wix to Other Website Builders: Can Anyone Top the Best?

If you run a small business, you want a website to go with it. Websites boost business traffic by a significant amount, and are an important business tool in today’s digital world. You may want a simple website that serves as your online business card for anyone who wants to know more, or you could go all the way to a full online store with multiple payment options.

Unless you’re extremely tech savvy, or want to pay top dollar for a full custom website designer, the fastest, easiest, and most cost-effective way to get a working business website is to use a website builder. Wix is the most famous, but there are several alternatives. We’ve reviewed 4 other options to see if anyone can compare to Wix itself.

Wix

Best for: Anyone from small to medium businesses to freelancers and bloggers

Customer support: Phone, email, and live chat during working hours and 24/7 for premium customers

Wix is one of the easiest websites to use with a very intuitive drag-and-drop web builder platform that gives users full creativity to customize their website. There are over 500 templates organized into 70 categories so that you can get started quickly and then change the layout, color scheme, and other elements without needing any coding knowledge at all. A powerful image editor adds special video, 3D parallax, and other effects with plenty of stock images to get started and all Wix-designed sites are automatically mobile responsive. Wix also makes available an impressive array of features that include SEO tools, a marketing suite with social media integration and CRM plugins, and a full online store. Wix’s app marketplace hands over the ability to pretty much anything you’d like to your website by choosing the right app.

You can set up a professional looking website even faster if you use Wix’s new ADI option. You just answer a few introductory questions about what type of website you want and then Wix will present you with a complete site. You can then tweak it as much as you’d like to exactly suit your wishes.

Although Wix’s plans aren’t the cheapest, it does offer the best value for money. Hosting, a custom domain name, unlimited pages, and premium support are all included in its top priced plans along with very worthwhile offers such as $75 for your next Google Adwords campaign and $50 for your next Facebook ads campaign, as well as 20 free email marketing campaigns each month. Even the free tier offers up to 500MB of storage and bandwidth, free hosting, and access to the app marketplace to choose which add-ons you want to pay for along with the full Wix web builder platform.

SiteBuilder

Price: $0-$19.98

Templates available: 1,000

Best for: Small- to medium-size businesses and bloggers that don’t need an online store

Customer support: 24/7 through live chat and email. 24/7 phone support for Canada and the USA, the UK, and Australia

SiteBuilder is a simple and plain-looking, low-cost website builder platform without many frills. This is an advantage in one way, since it makes for a more intuitive and easy-to-use website builder. Like Wix, SiteBuilder offers a drag-and-drop platform that lets even the most technologically-phobic website builder create a customized website without needing to use a drop of code. You can easily add a blog onto any website. SiteBuilder also has an extensive library of images, over 1,000 website templates, a suite of social media marketing tools, and a Google maps plugin. A custom domain name, priority support, and an ad-free website are available without paying over the odds.

However, SiteBuilder’s low cost is explained by the limited array of features on offer. Extensive SEO and analytics tools and a mobile responsive site are only available on certain tiers of paid plan and you’ll only be able to build an online store if you pay for the most expensive tier. Even the highest paid plan only offers 10GB of storage, meaning that you can’t include too many high-resolution videos or images. There is customer support available through email and live chat 24/7 with the addition of round the clock telephone support for customers in the USA, Canada, the UK, and Australia, but it’s outsourced overseas which can make it difficult to fully understand the customer representatives.

Web.com

Price: $5.95 - $22.95*

Templates available: 2,500

Best for: Small businesses that want someone else to build a good website for them

Customer support: 24/7 phone support

Web.com offers an intuitive drag-and-drop web building platform that is similar to Wix, but it is extremely prone to bugs and can be highly frustrating for users as it crashes multiple times. It’s also not mobile-responsive, which is a serious drawback these days. However, it does save your website as you go so that you can switch between templates without losing the work you’ve already done. There is an extensive Ecommerce setup with plenty of useful features like the ability to generate product descriptions and coupon codes and full CRM integration as well as SEO tools in the higher-cost Ecommerce plans.

Web.com’s strength is really in its build-it-for-me offering which bridges the gap between DIY website builders and custom website designers. The build-it-for-me plan provides a dedicated small business analyst who helps you create the right website for your needs. It’s really an ongoing website management plan since Web.com will build the site with SEO, social media integration, and full Ecommerce functionality and then continue to develop and maintain your site after it’s up and running.

However, this level of care costs a lot. Free hosting, unlimited storage space, and a business email with the higher paid plans begins at $22.95 per month but quickly adds up since you have to pay extra for many add-ons. On top of that, the custom domain is only free for the first year and then costs an extra $37 every year.

*Build-it-for-me pricing not located

GoDaddy

Price: $7.99-$39.99

Templates available: 300+

Best for: Small businesses that don’t need an online store

Customer support: 24/7 phone and live chat

GoDaddy is a well-known name and the prices are good value for money. Like Wix, you’ll find an intuitive drag-and-drop website building platform that enables non-technologically proficient business owners to make their own website. All sites are mobile responsive and there is good backup to restore your website if it crashes as well as top-level customer support. Free hosting is included in the top-level plan, which also covers a fully kitted-out online store with plenty of Ecommerce tools.

Although GoDaddy seems to offer most of the same features as Wix, the extent to which you can customize and be creative with your new website is much more limited. There are over 300 templates, but they don’t differ so much from each other. The included SEO tools are fairly basic and you have to pay for a customized domain name. The price difference between the top Ecommerce option with an online store and the next tier down is also very large.

Hibu

Price: Custom pricing from $99

Templates available: N/A

Best for: Small businesses that want it all built for them

Customer support: 24/7 live chat, phone support during working hours, one-on-one specialist consultation

Hibu differs somewhat from the other website builders we’ve reviewed here because it doesn’t offer DIY website building. Instead, it is similar to the build-it-for-me option offered by Web.com. Hibu offers to build every page of your website with SEO tools, mobile responsive features, and analytics. You can also drag and drop elements around the website during the building process. There are plenty of add-ons to choose from and a custom domain name is included in the price.

However, the quality of the websites can be disappointing. Many users have been frustrated by the SEO structuring and dislike having a website that looks a lot like it was built off of a template. Every website looks kind of similar without a lot of creativity or range of designs. The Ecommerce tools are also quite limited and because it was built for you, it’s not easy to go in and redesign the site when you want to make changes.

Bottom Line

Overall, while there are alternatives to Wix that are almost as good, nothing can quite beat the best in the market.

Sarah Pritzker

Sarah Pritzker is a content writer with years of experience and a keen interest in the vast world of online consumer products. She enjoys helping readers make sense of the options on the market in industries including online marketing, VoIP, hosting and website builders.

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